5 Ways to Increase Your App Store Optimization

November 27, 2017

5:00 pm

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So, you’ve built your mobile app and it’s live on the app store of your choice. You’ve put hours and hours into this project and you’re excited that it’s over, but you’ve realized that nobody is downloading your app yet.

How strange, you might think? Not really – there are millions of apps on the app stores, with thousands launched every day. You have to do much more than just create your app; you have to market and optimize your mobile app to ensure it ranks as highly on the app store as possible.

Ensuring that more users find your app is what is known as App Store Optimization (ASO). ASO, along with traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is what mobile app store search rankings are based on, according to Justin Briggs, Moz.

“For iOS, the primary public metrics are ratings and reviews,” Briggs says.“However, app performance can be inferred using the app store’s ranking charts and search results, which can be leveraged as proxies of these performance metrics”

Titles, descriptions, and device and platform keywords all count. Additionally, dynamic success metrics impact the ranking of your mobile app. The best way to judge your success is to track multiple metrics, including:

Number and Quality of Ratings, Score, and Analysis

App store rankings rely heavily on user reviews and scores. Naturally, they’re quite a good mechanism for helping users decide whether they want to choose to download an app or not. That is provided of course that they’re used properly by the reviewers. For example, a positive review that doesn’t overly help other users’ answer questions they might have about the app isn’t actually that useful, and thus, wouldn’t be considered high in sentiment or quality content.

Number and Frequency of Downloads

Unsurprisingly, the most popular apps receive the most downloads. If you want your app to rank highly on the app store it has to show not just high download numbers, but also high download frequency. This means that over a period of time your app needs to consistently be downloaded.

Engagement and Retention

This metric is arguably the most important for app owners. The rate of retention is a figure that has haunted many organizations looking to boost their app search rankings. Over the period of 30-90 days most users will not return to use your app after the first instance. If you’re able to increase this number then you’ll ultimately rank higher in the app store search.

Internal Links in App Store

Using internal links is a great way to boost the ranking of your app. It obviously encourages users to browse the store (which Google and Apple like!) and it lets them view your other apps.

Freshness

Keeping your app up-to-date also improves your retention rates (see above). If you regularly update your mobile apps and ensure the content is compelling, useful, and relevant for your users then this will positively impact how it ranks on the app store.

Essentially, increasing your app’s average rating number, increasing your volume of ratings, and increasing downloads of your app will have the greatest influence on your mobile app search ranking. Updating the content of the app to ensure it is of the utmost relevance and usefulness to your users will in return increase the downloads your apps receives, and thus, deserves.